The Dick Gibson Show (26 page)

“You’re married, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s Miss Tabisco, your chauffeur?”

“Miss Tabisco is one of my pupils. She’s one of the scholars here at HCC.”

Laverne shrugged. “Listen, I’ve got to make some phone calls,” she said. “Just hand me that little address book, would you, the one on the desk.” I gave her her book. It was opened to her page on Hartford. In it she had written down the names and phone numbers of about two dozen people here—the editors of the high-school and junior-high-school newspapers, chairmen of dance committees, even the entertainment editors on the
Courant
and the
Intelligencer.
I lay back on her bed and listened to her on the phone. “Hi,” she’d say, “this is Laverne Luftig, the ten-year-old singer. I sent you a letter about two weeks ago, and I’m calling to remind you about my press conference tomorrow morning. Don’t forget now, I’m looking forward to meeting you personally and presenting you with an autographed copy of my new recording.” Then when she finished with the list, she called the manager of the hotel to double-check the arrangements for the hospitality suite for the press conference. She was wonderful.

“What do your parents think about your career?” I asked her. Then it suddenly occurred to me that her song might be autobiographical. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “are your parents living, Laverne?”

“Yeah,” she said, “but my manager died. Listen, it was sweet of you to pick me up and fill me in about tonight, but don’t you think you ought to be getting back? I mean, won’t Miss Tabisco and your wife be wondering what’s happened to you?”

“Shall I tell you a little secret, Laverne?”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve checked into the hotel. My room is just below yours.”

It was time for station identification and a commercial. During the break Bernie Perk told Jack Patterson that he thought he’d better not go on with his story, but Jack didn’t seem even to hear him. He had stopped obediently for the commercial break and now seemed as remote as when he had slumped in his chair earlier. Then, two seconds before being given their cue, Behr-Bleibtreau said again that someone in the studio was carrying a gun.

D
ICK
: What was that? What did you just say?

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: “Look, Professor—” Laverne said.
“Don’t send me away, Laverne. I just want to look at you. Make some more calls. I like to watch your face when you’re on the phone.”

D
ICK
: Professor Behr-Bleibtreau, what was that you said?

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: A ten-year-old girl? A ten-year-old girl’s face? Is that what you’re telling us?

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: Yes, sir.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: Go on.

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: “Yeah, well, it’s time for my nap.”

“Don’t give me that, Laverne.”

“I’m ten years old, for God’s sake.”

“Juliet was thirteen.”

“I may be hip but I’m just a kid.”

“Dante fell in love with Beatrice when she was only eleven.”

“Just because I’m in show business, don’t think I’m loose.”

“Lord Byron loved Haidée when she was barely twelve.”

“I’m
ten.
”

“You’re ten and a
half.”
“You’re mussing my hair.”

“Helen of Troy was nine. So was Héloïse when Abelard fell for her. Psyche was six, Laverne. And what about Little Red Riding Hood? When you come right down to it, how old could Eve have been—a day, two days?”

“My dress, you’re mussing me. My dress is all the way up.”

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: This is incredible. You—you—

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: All I did was
kiss
her, I
tell
you. It was her face. This wasn’t adultery. I swear, Annette. I
swear,
Miss Tabisco. It was
her face.
I mean, she wasn’t even well developed. Where was the sex? She had no bust, no hips. I never even
looked
at her legs. All I did was kiss her. The bones and intelligence and beauty. My tongue like a red ribbon in her mouth.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
:
Disgusting!

M
EL
S
ON
: Where were your hands?

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: In her hair, in her ears. Vaulting her teeth. In her syrups and salivas.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Oh, Jack.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: What did she say after all this?

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: That I couldn’t come to her press conference.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: Now I’ve heard everything.

MEL SON: I think so.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Jack, you shouldn’t have told that story on yourself. Why did you tell such a story?

D
ICK
: I would have stopped him, but he said it would be all right.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: The man’s a slime.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: What’s the matter with you, Pepper? It was a joke.
Ladies and gentlemen, I knew Professor Patterson since he first moved into the Hartford area, and believe me he is not the type of person he describes in this story.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: I wish he’d told Professor Behr-Bleibtreau about the memory expert.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Is he all right? Why’s he smiling like that?

M
EL
S
ON
: What’s
she
doing?

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: That’s right, Annette. There, that should make him feel better. His color’s coming back. Good. I think he’ll be okay.

D
ICK
: You can sit there beside him, Annette.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: The memory expert?

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: Maybe Jack wasn’t on that panel. Were you, Jack? Was he, Dick?

D
ICK
: I don’t know, I don’t recall … Jack—do you want Annette to take you home?

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
:
Mrs. Patterson, it was all a joke. Your husband is a very good man. I have been with him when he has fought the anti-fluoridation people to a standstill with the force of his powerful logic. I don’t
know why he would tell such a joke on himself. There is absolutely nothing to worry about. He’s resting quietly.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: Were
you
on the panel with the memory expert, Mel?

M
EL
S
ON
: I don’t—ha ha—I don’t remember.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: It’s loaded.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: He was on the show because of me. I mean, Dick was just doing him a favor. He needed the exposure at the time.

You have to understand something about my school, Professor. We’re not a modeling agency—that is, not exactly. In your large cities where a real advertising industry exists—New York, of course, Chicago, L.A., a few others—there are schools which specialize in training girls to be models. A lot of these places are just phony, you understand, but some of them are quite good. I myself am a graduate of one of the better agency schools in San Francisco and had a pretty good career as a model in New York during the war.

Anyway, when age, ahem, withered and custom staled my infinite variety, when I entered my thirties, that is—I’m thirty- eight now—

M
EL
S
ON
: A
perfect
thirty-eight—

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: Thank you, love—and saw that the demand for Miss Steep’s services was falling off rather too dramatically, I reverted to type, for I’m
not
a perfect thirty-eight, and I do not, whatever my charms of face and figure, exude riches, which is what’s called for today—I mean that 5th Avenue look that speaks of a four- year-old boy in the Central Park sunshine with his nanny, I mean that Biarritz aura. It is nature’s way. At any rate at thirty-one and a half I reverted to type, which in my case is Big Boned Northern California Rain Forest, and I knew that if I were to keep body and soul together I would have to leave New York. Well! What could a thirty-one-and-a-half-year-old gal do who all her working life had done nothing but watch the birdy? The birdy had flown. To start up a modeling agency or a modeling school in New York or any of those other places I mentioned and hope to make a go of it was simply out of the question. To be myself on the staff of such a school was inside the question but out of the answer. I’d earned too much big money in New York to take that kind of cut. But I had saved some of this money, and I thought I might start up an agency school in some smaller city. She’s an honest wench, however. She knew the market, knew the teensy-weensy demand for the graduates of such schools in such places. She would not have been giving full dollar value. The solution was the Charm School. A charm school in a town like Hartford has
some
tie-in with advertising. The big stores will use its girls for their Christmas brochures and ads. The developer may put one of its blondes up on water skis for the Hidden Lakes Estates billboard. (Forgive me my style as you did Dick’s. Probably as I go on I will work myself out of it. It’s just the way those of us who have been around, and are not perhaps too intelligent, talk.) But mostly the function of the Charm School is to teach charm, i.e.
(very rapidly), “
(1) a power of pleasing or attracting, as through personality or beauty; (2) a trait or feature imparting this power; (3) attractiveness—”

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: “(4) a trinket to be worn on a chain bracelet, etc.; (5) something worn for its supposed magical effect; amulet; (6) any action supposed to have magical power; (7) the chanting or recitation of a magic verse or formula.”

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: Yes. “—
vt
(8) to delight or please greatly by beauty, attractiveness, etc.; enchant.”

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: “
(9) to act upon someone or something with or as with a compelling or magical force!”

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: Yes. I don’t do that.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: Go on, please.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: We aren’t a college, or even a finishing school. We’re not accredited. Our girls aren’t wealthy, they don’t come out of or go back into what is called polite society. You might be amused if you saw some of the things we do, there are books in our school, for instance, but we balance them on our heads. You’d be amused, but you’d need some charm yourself if you laughed. We render a service, you see. To the clumsy we do, the shy, the unconfident, to the ungraceful and ungainly and maladroit, to the bunglers and klutzes, the tongue-tied of body and spirit. Oh, we get them—all the wallflowers and fatties, all the unpopular, cripples to acne and dandruff. And I’m not just talking about teen-agers. There are housewives too. I mean the timid, I mean the terrified. There are women—a lot of them mothers—whose husbands have never seen them naked, who undress in closets and bathe only when they’re alone in the house—with the bathroom door locked and the radio off. They don’t go to doctors and they can’t purchase sanitary napkins in a drugstore, or bring themselves to buy a roll of toilet paper. I know one too shy to try on a dress in the curtained booth at the back of the department store, and another who won’t stand in front of a three-way mirror. Oh, the terror in Hartford! You just don’t know.